Grab your wellies, folks; developer Pragmatic Play is taking us out of town for a trip to see where much of our food comes from. That is crops, vegetables, and so on. Fortunately, as is usually the case, Country Farming doesn't delve into any of the gory details of food production, so no storms, droughts, or getting your fingers dirty in any way. Instead, Country Farming presents a sunny side of the industry, and its jolly exterior is paired with features like Mystery symbols, symbol-triggered Jackpot prizes, free spins, and a bonus buy.
Jolly is one way of describing Country Farming's exterior, where a wood-built gaming grid sits in the fields, a bale of hay on one side, and a scarecrow swaying in the breeze on the other. Inspecting the background further, what can be made out are farm-oriented objects like a windmill, a redwood barn, a smoking tractor, sheep, grass, all that sort of thing. It's the sort of classic representation of rural life which might make the most ardent urbanite question their career choices. Well, maybe not, but Country Farming is a nice-looking farm game, and a row of prize values arranged above the grid provides a dash of motivation for gamblers to proceed.
>To do so, a bet of 20 p/c to $/€100 may be selected, and players are then able to buy the free spins bonus round should they so choose at the cost of 100 times the bet. When playing in the regular mode, the return value is 96.07%, whereas, for the feature buy, it is 96.06% - bearing in mind that Country Farming is available with two lower RTP models. On the volatility side, Pragmatic Play has marked Country Farming as 5 out of 5, meaning it's mathematically highly volatile.
The game utilises 20 paylines on its 5-reel, 3-row matrix, linking wins when matching symbols land from the left-hand side over consecutive reels. The regular paying symbols, in ascending order, are a carrot, corn, pumpkin, turkey, duck, chicken, pig, sheep, and cow. They pay 1.5 to 50 times the bet for a 5-of-a-kind winning line. A happy-looking doggie has been printed on the wild symbol, which is present on all reels. Wilds replace any regular pay symbols and pay up to 100 times the bet for a 5 wild symbol winning line.
>Country Farming is a pretty simple game when it comes to features, possessing Mystery symbols, Fixed Jackpots, and free spins.
When the reels stop spinning, all Mystery symbols in view transform into one of the regular pay symbols. Revealed symbols are randomly selected.
Jackpot symbols appear on all reels in Country Farming. Landing at least 5 of them triggers an instant money bonus award. More precisely, landing 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 Jackpot symbols awards 10x, 60x, 250x, 1,000x, or 10,000x the bet, respectively.
Farmer scatter symbols may land on reels 2, 3, and 4. Hitting 3 scatter symbols awards 10 free spins. In free spins, a Jackpot Wild symbol may appear. The Jackpot Wild can be used to replace any regular pay symbols, and it can also be used in combination with any Jackpot or Jackpot Wild symbols to award the fixed Jackpots. Landing 3 scatter symbols in the feature awards an extra 10 free spins.
>Pragmatic Play is no stranger to the farmyard, having been there recently in the highly playable Rabbit Garden online slot. Where Rabbit Garden was a fairly complex (by comparison) cluster playing slot with an exciting coin symbols feature, Country Farming is a lot more of a classic slot experience. Or if we use an exaggerated metaphor, Rabbit Garden was like growing 'meat' in a petri dish out of plant-based proteins in an off-world lab, while Country Farming is like digging up a bunch of dirt and tossing a few seeds in there and letting nature do the rest.
As such, Country Farming's base game could be a tad dull at times. The Mystery symbol drops a lot, but most of the time, it didn't seem to do much. Even covering 4 reels at a time more than once, but not linking up with anything on the second reel - so while it looked impressive, it didn't result in any moolah. In saying that, full-screen wins are certainly possible through the Mystery symbol. Jackpot symbols weren't overly plentiful in the base game either, so unlike games like 9 Masks of Fire, Country Farming doesn't seem to use its Jackpot symbols triggering prize wins feature to add much excitement to the base game. They didn't land in free spins much, either. Maybe we hit an extended drought during testing, or perhaps Country Farming just isn't a game which triggers Jackpot scatter wins a whole heck of a lot. Perhaps this will be a deal breaker for players looking for a scatter prize win game that lets off super regular fireworks - then again, perhaps this different approach will be a better suit for others?
On the plus side, when Country Farming does blow up, its Jackpot prizes have fairly decent value, especially the 10,000x the bet top prize, which is quite high for this sort of game. And so, for those looking for a scatter prize style game that seems to favour bigger prize hits over high-frequency prize hits in a farmyard environment, then Country Farming might put a smile on their dial.
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